Bill Clinton: Stop obsessing over Hillary

Bill Clinton's getting tired of all the speculation over whether his wife, Hillary, will run for president in 2016.

The former president hasn't shied away from encouraging his wife to seek the White House but in an appearance at a fiscal policy summit today, he derided the obsession over Hillary's future as "the worst expenditure of our time."

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“We need to be worried about the work at hand, all of us do, so whoever the next president is has an easier set of choices before him or hear to build America’s future,” he said at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2013 fiscal summit. “All that really matters in the end is whether what you do turns your good intentions into real changes, and it obscures our capacity to do that and plays to our national tendency to [suffer from] attention deficit disorder when it comes to politics and public problems.”

“It’s frustrating when I think we’re majoring in the minors, either over the budget debate, or going right back to politics as soon as the last election is over instead of getting into the grimy details where the future of America will be written.”

Meanwhile, Clinton is urging President Barack Obama to chase an overhaul to the corporate tax code without getting bogged down in efforts to reform individual tax laws.

“The White House should offer a corporate tax reform without getting all the individual things worked out,” he said.

The corporate-only approach is best, he said, because congressional Republicans have made clear they won’t support new revenue.

“These guys, their most important thing is never to raise taxes,” he said. “They say, ‘We already raised taxes. We’re never going to do that again — even in tax reform.’

The question over whether to raise revenue from tax reform has been one of the biggest hurdles to an overhaul. Democrats want to raise taxes on top earners while Republicans say revenue generated from closing loopholes should be used to pay for lower rates.

Republicans and many Democrats, however, believe that a corporate tax overhaul should be revenue-neutral.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 11:53 a.m. on May 7, 2013.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misidentified where Bill Clinton spoke. The former president was speaking at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2013 fiscal summit.